Anthropology, the need for comparison and the absence of a peasantry in England.

Duration: 3 mins 39 secs

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Description:	Anthropology, the need for comparison and the absence of English peasants. Alan talks about the effects of moving from history to anthropology and the effects of working as an anthropologist in a Himalayan community in Nepal in 1968. It changed everything and altered the way I saw things. Looking at Earls Colne through the experience of having worked in a real peasant society brought home the strangeness and the fact that England was so unlike a peasant society. Alan talks about the nature of the paradigmatic shift he tried to make in ‘The Origins of English Individualism’, the nature of blinkers, passionate curiosity. Likewise, to understand Japan he had to go to China. Comparison is essential, not through logical steps. Emotional and imaginative leaps and how they are made.

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Anthropology, the need for comparison and the absence of English peasants. Alan talks about the effects of moving from history to anthropology and the effects of working as an anthropologist in a Himalayan community in Nepal in 1968. It changed everything and altered the way I saw things. Looking at Earls Colne through the experience of having worked in a real peasant society brought home the strangeness and the fact that England was so unlike a peasant society. Alan talks about the nature of the paradigmatic shift he tried to make in ‘The Origins of English Individualism’, the nature of blinkers, passionate curiosity. Likewise, to understand Japan he had to go to China. Comparison is essential, not through logical steps. Emotional and imaginative leaps and how they are made.


Created:	2018-03-18 14:46
Collection:	Visit to Earls Colne, Essex in August 2006 - description of various projects
Publisher:	University of Cambridge
Copyright:	Prof Alan Macfarlane
Language:	eng (English)

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